How Hybrid Was vCloud Hybrid Service

I’ve chatted with a lot of folks over the last year, and I have been lucky enough to have access to preview releases of the vCHS platform prior to its initial launch. The name was chosen with a specific target of allowing VMware customers to extend their data center to the shared or dedicated externally hosted environment using the tools and techniques that are familiar to them.

Hybrid is a very specific use-case, and this was the goal of the product from what I can tell. It was designed to extend workloads to an off-premises cloud environment.

Through my conversations, I found that many of the people I’ve chatted with have actually broken the mold on this and they were using it in the same way that I was. An entirely standalone platform that happened to be running VMware as the product ecosystem.

So if the product isn’t really being consumed as a “hybrid” service, it does seem fitting that it should be named appropriately.

vCloud Air For Everyone

If you want to spin up an environment, you have no need to have the on-premises portion of the build. You can do so with an on-premises and not connect the two also. Really, the use-cases are there for many different configurations.

The real win for existing VMware customers is that you can export machines and bring them into your vCloud Air environment. You can also reverse the process and build in the vCloud Air platform and export for local consumption and testing. The platform familiarity is a definitely win, and given the large number of VMware implementations at customers ranging from SMB up to massive enterprises, there is no doubt that having the common base to deploy into will be a winning proposition.